A Body-Switching Teen Romance Anime Disaster Flick With 'Your Name.' On ItYour Name. was the most popular film in the world for the first two months of 2017. Now, the deeply resonant body-switching anime comes to the U.S.

A Body-Switching Teen Romance Anime Disaster Flick With 'Your Name.' On It

Let's take a break from the news and go to the movies. For the first two months of this year, a teen romance called "Your Name" was the biggest film of 2017, bigger even than "Lego Batman." It's a Japanese anime film that made more than $300 million at box offices across Asia. "Your Name" finally opens in the U.S. today. Critic Bob Mondello says it's a film worth seeing.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Taki and Mitsuha may both be teenagers, but they could hardly be more different. Taki is a street-savvy boy in Tokyo, raging hormones in full rage.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "YOUR NAME")

MICHAEL SINTERNIKLAAS: (As Taki Tachibana) Are you the one that's been messing with my phone?

MONDELLO: Mitsuha's a country girl bored with the homemaking rut she's stuck in out in the boondocks.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "YOUR NAME")

STEPHANIE SHEH: (As Mitsuha Miyamizu) I hate this town. Please make me a handsome Tokyo boy in my next life.

MONDELLO: They'd be unlikely even to know about each other, except one morning Taki wakes up in an unfamiliar room, looks down at himself and sees a girl's body. His first impulse is exactly what you'd expect of a teenage boy. He brings his hands to his chest.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "YOUR NAME")

SHEH: (As Mitsuha Miyamizu) Whoa. They're so realistic feeling.

CATIE HARVEY: (As Yotsuha Miyamizu) Sis, what are you doing?

MONDELLO: Oops, busted.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "YOUR NAME")

SHEH: (As Mitsuha Miyamizu) Sis? Me?

HARVEY: (As Yotsuha Miyamizu) Breakfast time. Hurry up.

MONDELLO: A look in the mirror clarifies things. Figuring it's a dream, Taki reluctantly decides to go with it. Something similar happens in his bedroom, where Mitsuha wakes up, looks at herself and sees his body. She's even more alarmed...

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "YOUR NAME")

SINTERNIKLAAS: (As Mitsuha Miyamizu, gasps).

MONDELLO: ...Until she looks outside.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "YOUR NAME")

SINTERNIKLAAS: (As Mitsuha Miyamizu) I'm in Tokyo.

MONDELLO: She's definitely going with it. They stumble through their respective days, both of them assuming they're just having a strange dream. But over the course of a couple of weeks...

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "YOUR NAME")

SHEH: (As Mitsuha Miyamizu) I'm slowly beginning to realize what's going on. Taki's in high school and living in Tokyo.

SINTERNIKLAAS: (As Taki Tachibana) Two or three times a week, I'll suddenly and randomly switch with Mitsuha. It was somewhere out in the boonies. The trigger is sleep. The cause is unknown.

SHEH: (As Mitsuha Miyamizu) Any memories I have of the switch get more and more hazy after I wake up.

MONDELLO: They start working out ground rules, leaving helpful notes, trying not to wreck each other's lives. And at about the moment you're waiting for them to just meet, what has seemed like a glistening teen rom-com turns into a darker, more affecting, very different sort of story - a harrowing survival tale that blends elements of Japan's recent real life nuclear reactor meltdown with the last reel of the disaster movie "Deep Impact" plus time travel. In short, anime doing what anime does best.

Along the way, you realize how smart writer director Makoto Shinkai has been in adapting his own novel for the screen, and not just with beautiful images. Take the body switching - with all the changes wrought by puberty, teenagers effectively wake up in new bodies every morning anyway. Developing breasts do, of course, interest Taki. He's a boy. But they're new for Mitsuha too, as are the feelings these kids are experiencing - the tension between respect and rebellion and, of course, the urgent need to recall the name they can't remember from the dream they're not sure they're having.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "YOUR NAME")

SINTERNIKLAAS: (As Taki Tachibana) What's your name?

MONDELLO: Taki sketches a town he's never been to and wonders, why does looking at it make my chest so tight? This is not the cute little switcheroo comedy you thought you were watching at the beginning - it's deeper, more resonant. In the U.S., theaters have a choice. They can show "Your Name" dubbed into English or in Japanese with subtitles.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "YOUR NAME")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTORS: (As characters, speaking Japanese).

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character, singing in Japanese).

MONDELLO: I've seen both. And while they have different virtues, the story is affecting either way. Taki and Mitsuha think they're dreaming. And after about the first 40 minutes of their shimmering film, you may think you are, too. I'm Bob Mondello.

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